The Government of Alberta, the Alberta Health Services is our primary partner in the delivery of services. They do most of our diagnostics around things like MRIs. They are

the specialists that we send our residents to, and they have a direct link and cooperation with our practitioners here in the Northwest Territories and agreements that allow them to share information, where appropriate, as long as it falls under the Health Information Act and the Access to Information.

We have agreements in place that allow us to work together and refer to them. We don’t have those same agreements with BC. It would take negotiation to set up those types of agreements, and we’ve got to do, obviously, cost-benefit analysis on that and make sure that those agreements are actually going to provide some value.

In the meantime, I do remind the Member as well as the residents of the Northwest Territories, and particularly Liard, as you travel outside of the Northwest Territories and you do go to hospitals or health centres outside of the Northwest Territories, those costs are recovered under our reciprocal billing and you shouldn’t have a cost. Where we’ve run into a difficulty with Fort Nelson is they don’t have the ability to refer back to the Northwest Territories for things like home care, physio, occupational therapy or any of the additional programs that we provide above and beyond what is consistent across this country.